Holiday Gift Idea #3: ‘Footprints’ In The Shorthand!

Look, it’s Christmas – yes, yes, Merry Christmas and all that! – but you’ve just found out Aunt Judy’s all alone today and would really like to see you and the kids, and sure it’s a pain in the ass, but she still has the first dollar she ever earned so it can’t hurt to spend a few minutes with her – after all, she’s not going to live forever and she’s got to leave that money to someone…!

Dare you drop by without a gift?

No sir! What to do, what to do?

Walmart to the rescue! Select locations open with limited holiday hours today!

Over in their tasteless gift section, five bucks gets you this winner:

What they’ve done, see, is they’ve whittled down the inspiring essay “Footprints in the Sand” on this plaque to just thirty-one words…

…and edited it even more mercilessly (eighteen words) on the mug:

While the manufacturer is surely presuming that “Footprints In the Sand” is so well-known by now that they only need hit the highlights to get its message across, excising most of the text (and the entire setup, and all references to sand) was likely more a copyright concern. There are a handful of folks who claim authorship of “Footprints in the Sand,” but it looks like only the estate of Mary Stevenson makes a point of protecting it – judging by this magnificent website (from which the Ted Parsnips Web Design Team could learn a thing or two)!

One wonders, of course, if the theme – and the aggressive butchering of a maudlin classic – is continued on the tea bags inside that little box of tea in this gift set. I’d like to think, and now you would, too – that it is. And that it might look like this: